The Inside Informant

His criminal record dates to 1978 and includes more than a dozen convictions. He has been in the penitentiary four times and is wanted in four states. His parole officer once called him "a menace to society." A federal prosecutor wrote he was "a pathological liar . . . not worthy of this court's trust."

Indeed, Tommy Dye lies about almost everything, even his own name. He has a dozen aliases, court and police records show, and he uses them liberally, usually when he is arrested. William Zonka, Thomas O'Neil, Sean P. Kelly, Tommy Welch, Thomas Moriarty--Dye is the man behind each of the names. Selling cocaine, he used the moniker Big Daddy Woo Woo.

Even under oath, Dye lies. He once told a judge he was the valedictorian at St. Michael's High School in Chicago, but he did not even finish high school. He told a federal grand jury that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. That, too, was a lie. He took some correspondence classes in prison and has worked as a waiter.

But when Dye testified at the 1993 murder trial of Steve Manning, a corrupt former Chicago police officer facing a possible death sentence, Cook County prosecutors Patrick J. Quinn and William Gamboney asked jurors to believe that Dye was telling the truth.

Dye's testimony was the centerpiece of an otherwise weak case, one in which no physical evidence tied Manning to the murder. His word, and little more, put Manning on Death Row.

According to Dye, he and Manning were in Cook County Jail when Manning confessed to him the 1990 murder of a suburban trucking firm owner whose body was found floating in the Des Plaines River.

Manning, Dye testified, admitted committing the execution-style killing during six hours of tape recordings that Dye secretly made using a tiny recorder an FBI agent strapped to the inside of his right thigh.

But when the tapes were played in court, there were no murder confessions. Dye's explanation: Manning's confessions were lost in two seconds-long gaps in the recordings, one caused by a malfunction, the other by Dye bending over and inadvertently covering the microphones tucked under the waistband of his underwear.

In return for testifying against Manning, Dye's 14-year prison sentence on theft and firearms charges was cut to 6 years, and, according to court documents, he and a girlfriend were placed in the federal Witness Protection Program. Other criminal charges against him were dropped.

Dye's pivotal role in the Manning conviction provides a troubling glimpse into the world of the jailhouse informant, or snitch, the prisoner who trades information for favors--most often giving prosecutors a confession he claims he heard in exchange for some type of favor or leniency.

The use of such untrustworthy witnesses carries considerable costs in death-penalty cases--and not only by undermining the foundation of cases where the stakes are the highest. The misuse of informants also adds financial costs to taxpayers when convictions based on their testimony are retried or exonerated defendants receive court settlements.

Even prosecutors acknowledge that jailhouse informants are among the least reliable of witnesses. Yet in Illinois, at least 46 inmates have been sent to Death Row in cases where prosecutors used a jailhouse informant, according to a Tribune investigation that examined the 285 death-penalty cases since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.

In about half of those 46 cases, the informant played a significant role in the conviction. Often, prosecutors put jailhouse informants on the witness stand in cases where the evidence of guilt was flimsy or during sentencing to demonize a defendant with inflammatory accounts of the crime.

Prosecutors tried to use jailhouse informants in numerous other cases as well, according to the Tribune's investigation, but backed off after defense attorneys challenged their truthfulness and threatened to expose their backgrounds.

Snitch testimony helped convict or condemn 4 of the 12 Illinois Death Row inmates who were later exonerated. In two other cases, prosecutors had jailhouse informant testimony ready but did not use it.

Little to lose, much to gain

While prosecutors say jailhouse snitches can provide important--and truthful--testimony, informants have little to lose by lying on the witness stand. Rarely are they charged with perjury. Instead, they often have something very real to gain: time shaved off their sentence, creature comforts in jail or some other favor from prosecutors.

Informants who fabricate stories can glean details of a crime from newspapers or another inmate's legal papers and stitch them together into a compelling confession. In the most notorious cases, prosecutors and police have been accused of providing them with false stories to tell.

In Los Angeles, Leslie Vernon White was such a prolific jailhouse informant that in 1988 he demonstrated for jailers how simple it was to concoct a confession and convince prosecutors it was genuine.